Unforgivable Sin meets the Wideness of God's Mercy.

What happens when laxity in the clergy and the whole culture "accommodates" even blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?

Catholics know, or rather, Catholics are supposed to know, the difference between what is called Mortal Sin and Venial Sin. We should know that once we put on Christ, in so doing we die to the world, and avoid even the occasion or opportunity of sin. Of course, that is best done in a community of like-minded Christians. The bigger the community, or the more closed off from the outside world of sin, the easier it is to cooperate with the grace that is given to walk in right ways.

Mortal sin is sin unto the death of the soul, as John tells us in 1 John 5:

If any one sees his brother committing what is not a mortal
sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not
mortal. There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray
for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal. We know that any one born of God does not sin, but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us
understanding, to know him who is true; and we are in him who is true,
in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.--1 John 5:16-20

The conditions for a mortal sin are

that it must be a grave matter;

it must be committed with full knowledge of the gravity of the sin;

it must be committed with deliberate and complete consent, through a deliberate personal decision.

Mortal sin may be forgiven, through true contrition and repentance, confession, absolution and penance.

But there is yet another level of this mortal sin - Eternal Sin - which is unforgivable. Many, including myself, have wrestled with the meaning of this unforgivable sin. Most think it to be related to cursing God, or something on that order, in circumstances of great grief or tragedy, or perhaps blaming God for some evil that has befallen someone. Yet even that is a temporary, emotional and even irrational sin, committed in a not totally sane state of mind. That hardly seems worthy of eternal unforgiveness, especially after repentance.

And yet we have the Lord's words, from Matthew, Mark and Luke:

Or how can one enter a strong man's house and plunder his
goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder
his house. He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but
the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever says a word against the Son of man will be forgiven; but
whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in
this age or in the age to come. Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit. --Matt 12:29-33

But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his
goods, unless he first binds the strong man; then indeed he may plunder
his house. "Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin" --Mark 3:27-29

"And I tell you, every one who acknowledges me before men, the Son of man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but he who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God. And every one who speaks a word against the Son of man will be
forgiven; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be
forgiven.And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers
and the authorities, do not be anxious how or what you are to answer or
what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say." --Luke 12:8-12

What does this mean? How does one blaspheme against the Holy Spirit?

It is, apparently, the sin of Satan. It is knowing full well the will of God, and saying "I will not obey." It is making oneself equal to God, determining right and wrong. Ignoring God's law and making your own law. It is trivializing God.

John Paul the Great tells us that it involves claiming a "right" do do something forbidden by God. A right to sin, and to persist in sin, and a refusal and rejection of the unmerited grace that is given to avoid sin.

"Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is the sin committed by the
person who claims to have a 'right' to persist in evil - in any sin at
all - and who thus rejects redemption." --John Paul the Great

What this brings most immediately to mind is so-called "Gay Pride" and all the parades and celebrations of homosexuality and the lifestyle, and the "Community", and all the murdered and shot-up victims of Jihad in Orlando during one of these homosexual celebrations.

Pretend you are God, for a moment. Pretend that a soul is presented before you for judgment; the soul of a proud homosexual, who claimed every right to be and act homosexual. Who is the most guilty party for the sinful state of this soul, besides the soul itself?

Modern psychiatric and psychological evaluation, which, on no evidence whatsoever, no longer considers homosexuality to be any kind of disorder?

Modern teachers, who teach that homosexuality is natural and not unnatural, in need of careful consideration of students?

"Scientists" who claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that homosexuals are born that way?

Sinister dividers of culture, who claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that "gender" is whatever the possessor claims it to be at any moment in time?

The American court system, which has unconstitutionally conjured into being a "right" to be homosexual and to not be discriminated against, and to be included and accommodated in all institutions and throughout all of normal society?

Higher courts who overturn local law and lower court decisions in order to raise homosexuality to the level of a civil right?

The American entertainment industry, which glamorizes and promotes open homosexuality?

Homosexual Pastors in Archdioceses like Card. Dolan's New York Archdiocese, in which homosexuals are welcomed to full communion in the Church, and where the Archbishop himself leads the homosexual pride parade?

Public celebrities and public figures who openly declare that they have "no problem" with anyone else's sexual preferences?

Any one else who will not call a sin a sin, or an unnatural act an unnatural act, or a dangerous activity a dangerous activity, tolerating it and thereby condoning it, in public, and even in front of their own children?

God's law, which coincides perfectly with Natural Law, has not changed. Neither has nature.

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the
kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters,
nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. --1 Cor 6:9-10

So how the hell did our American culture get this way?

Houses have walls and doors, with locks. The purpose of the walls and doors is to keep family and property safe, and keep the robbers out.

"Good fences make good neighbors" because good fences mark a clear delineation between what is thine and what is mine.

Nations have borders and border guards and rules of entry. The purpose of national borders is to keep the citizenry and the territory safe, and keep invaders out.

Churches have rules of entry and membership and community. The reason for the rules is to protect the faith and keep the faithful faithful, and to keep the world, sin and opposition to the faith out.

Locked doors are the only things keeping your home and family safe.

National borders are the only things keeping civilization civilized.

Community rules are the only things keeping communities distinct.

Adherence to doctrine is the only thing keeping the Church the Church.

All of this is just simple common sense.

Marxism hates and seeks to eliminate private property.

As "Cultural Marxism" increasingly dominates Western thought, through disinformation, purposeful mal-education, indoctrination and propaganda, definable culture is supplanted by popularized notions of "diversity" and "multiculturalism". "Social Justice" is twisted and perverted to mean "Community Property", to be achieved through Class Warfare if need be.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property. --Karl Marx.

Therefore, Marxism hates and seeks to eliminate locked doors, walls, fences, borders and doctrines. Marxism is a globalist, anti-national ideology, that seeks world domination by "right" of perfecting mankind and creating a utopian worker's paradise, replacing all culture that exists.

Just as private property is supplanted by community property in Marxified Western thought, the family is supplanted by the commune, as the primal building block of society. Therefore, the "progressive" thinking that promotes familial death: contraception, fornication, cohabitation, casual sex, even adultery, homosexuality, sterilization, abortion, gender confusion, opposition to paternalism and all family authority, and opposition to all things prohibited by Judaeo-Christian teaching. Which means opposition to Christian religion.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion. --Karl Marx.

All of this is held to be social "progress" and liberating of mental enslavement to doctrine. But it is enslavement to sin. There is nothing liberating about it. It is not social progress; it is social regress.

And yet, the
SLIMC1
will tell you that this "progress" is well worth fighting for, against the "bigotry" of Western thought.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. --Karl Marx.

If you really want to know where the "Peace Movement" got started, all you need to do is to study what Marxism-Leninism says about itself. There is nothing peaceful about it. It is war, preceded by fooling the enemy into voluntarily disarming himself.

Evil still exists, despite the delusions of all the aging "Flower Children".

The whole evil scheme is to put a smiley face on evil and remove all separation between good and evil. To say "we're all the same", when we most certainly are not all the same.

To find redemption, we need to see how we got to this point.

Fornication led the way. Casual sex, cohabitation, sleeping around, reducing sex to a recreational activity, even a competitive activity with bragging rights, whether deservedly or not, is often the "excuse" given for the social blessing of homosexuality. Hey, its no skin off my nose what you do.

Note that the farther away one stands from the Lord the more he makes of himself the author of his own "rights". If they have a right to do it, so do I have a right to do it.

Step one, in this movement toward Eternal Sin, involves making an exception to cultural, moral and religious standards in just this one, single area of my life. After all, everybody is doing it, or something just like it. If it's OK for them, why should I be left out? But the sin is kept private; it is hidden from others.

Step two in this movement toward Eternal Sin, involves scandal, when others find out about it, and you continue in the sin anyway. This is actual promotion of sin, by personal example. It makes sin culturally acceptable in the minds of some observers.

Step three in this movement toward Eternal Sin, involves going public, "outing" yourself, and letting everyone know that you are a practicing sinner. This is a greater promotion of sin, by forcing friends and loved ones into a difficult decision regarding their relationship to you, versus their aversion to your form of sin. It makes the sin more socially tolerable for some, if not individually adoptable.

Step four in this movement toward Eternal Sin, involves taking pride in it, celebrating it, making public displays, participating in celebratory public events and parades, promoting the expansion of the sin, promoting the legalization of it, attacking the doctrines opposing it, and, essentially, shaking your fist in the face of God.

It is the loss of all sense of guilt and shame. The loss of conscience.

And again, we have to wonder about the guilt for this sin that attaches to the politicians, judges and justices, attorneys at law, celebrities and entertainers, news correspondents, and even Church clerics who work assiduously to normalize the sin, in general culture, in law and even in Church doctrine.

If they had all opposed it, would it ever have even gotten this far?

And where are you in all of this? If you can say, with a straight face, that you have "no personal problem" with anyone else's particular form of unchastity and sexual sin, then, why on earth do you say such an incredibly stupid and culturally destructive thing? You are called to condemn, not condone, intrinsic evil, and not be neutral on the issue.

Where are your own moral standards and cultural norms?

You make the culture.

The charge that "we" are forcing our religion on "them" is an obvious gross lie, and an absolute reversal of the truth of the matter. Sexual proclivities are not mentioned in Article One Section Eight of the Constitution, among the limited and enumerated powers of the federal government. That means no federal court should have even heard and adjudicated any related case, because it was a matter of state or lower jurisdiction, not federal.

It is "they" who, quite unconstitutionally, impose their blatant immorality upon "us"; not the other way round. Not through representative legislated law, but by unlegislated, unrepresentative, and even unconstitutional court action, establishing new law via case law legal precedent. In cases that never should have been heard.

In any case, the spiritual damage remains; sin is still sin.

What about the Wideness of God's Mercy?

I am no lettered expert on Catholic theology or doctrine, so this is just personal opinion, for what it's worth. I'm sure if its off track someone will point it out soon enough. But I think, possibly in the majority of cases, conversion and redemption is possible even for the proud activist promoter of the "right" to sin, provided he repents of it on his own, turns from it and seeks forgiveness.

My reasoning for this possibility rests on the command of Jesus, not only to believe, but to, first, Repent, and then Believe, in the Gospel (Mark 1:15).

It's not enough to merely believe. The call is for repentance, which I take to be conversion, or metanoia; a complete change of life and turning from sin to the Lord, and proactively living the Gospel. Not merely belief, but radical belief; life changing belief.

Consider the parable of the Prodigal Son, in Luke 15:11-32, as a case in point. This Scripture is most often, in homilies I have heard, been referred to as an analogy to God (the father in the story), the worst of sinners (the bad son in the story), and the unmitigated, unlimited love and mercy of the father, even when the son is so strongly and purposefully alienated from the father, and from the entire family and household of the father,

First, he demanded his inheritance, which was not due to him yet; an absolute insult to his father and to the rest of his family. Yet, he was given his inheritance; his decision was allowed. Then, he left the faith community of his father's household, for a foreign, totally alien land. Then, he squandered all of his inheritance on profligate living, drunkenness and prostitutes, and there was a famine in the land. He would up living with and feeding pigs, about as low as any Jew could go in uncleanliness and unworthiness, and he was starving, even at that.

Ultimately, when he had sunken as low as he could go, he came to his senses, and decided on a metanoia; to repent of his ways, return home in humility, to humbly seek his father's forgiveness and throw himself at his father's mercy, hoping to become a servant or a slave to the family household.

The father did not go seeking after him while he remained in his sin.

But note well that the father waited patiently, watching for him.

While he was still a long way off, the father saw him and ran to him, and embraced him. He ordered that sandals be put on his feet - servants did not wear sandals. He ordered him to be clothed in a tunic - the sign of nobility. He ordered a ring be put on his finger - and this was the ultimate sign of restoration; it was no ordinary ring. The family ring was a "signet" ring, bearing the family crest, the signature of the master of the house, granting the wearer the automatic social authority of a prince.

Imagine, if you can, God running out to meet you on your way to Him.

In my opinion, which could be wrong, all any sinner, of any variety, has to do is turn around. Turn from sin, and turn toward God. Take the step.

He didn't send His Son to die for nothing.

You are worth it.

There's a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice,
which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good;
there is mercy with the Savior;
there is healing in his blood.

There is no place where earth's sorrows
are more felt than in heaven;
there is no place where earth's failings
have such kind judgment given.
There is plentiful redemption
in the blood that has been shed;
there is joy for all the members
in the sorrows of the Head.

For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord.

=====

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Comments

Vic, this sin against the Holy Spirit has always mystified me. I have asked Priests and could never get an answer which I could understand and was so complicated that even Einstein would have had a head explosion. Thank you so much for making sense of gooblygook.

God Bless.

Date: Mon Jun 20 2016From: Vic BiorsethComment:

Maria:

Thank you; I hope it helps others.

I'm willing to bet there might be a blue million Catholic combat vets out there who might be wrestling with the same question, and never really got a satisfactory answer, or worse, never even sought one, having taken the Scriptures stone-cold literally.

And there are all those other committed-to-sin souls out there who don't know about their own free-will role in their own salvation. If they would just turn from it, and return to the fold in humility, they could encounter their own redemption, just like the Prodigal Son.

In fact, if they actually do repent of it and convert from it, that, in and of itself, might disprove (or undo?) the sin against the Holy Spirit.

I'm no real theologian, but this is the best I could do, and I just hope it helps someone.

Regards,

Vic

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What you are in God's sight is what you are and nothing more”—Justice Clarence Thomas

"Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is the sin committed by the person who claims to have a 'right' to persist in evil-in any sin at all-and who thus rejects redemption." Pope Saint John Paul the GreatDOMINUM ET VIVIFICANTEM

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Atheist Genesis:

In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing.
And then nothing accidentally exploded and created everything.
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And then some bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into self-replicating bits of everything.
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See?

“ … for I have sworn upon
the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind
of man.” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in
the year of our Lord 1800. The context
involved resistance to any form of Christianity or Deism legally imposing
itself throughout the USA. We must wonder what he might say
about our current government's forced imposition of strict secularism – i.e.,
anti-theism – throughout the USA. I submit that legally enforced secularism of society, like theocracy, like Marxism,
and like Islam, is, precisely, a form of tyranny over the mind of man.Nothing good can come from the religious cleansing of Judaeo-Christian society. Government imposed secularism is just another form of theocracy.